I don’t know a whole heck of a lot about anime, this I’ll admit right now. Though in my youth I managed to watch things like “Dragonball” before the “Z” got tossed in, I just had little interest in following the medium (or art form, or whatever you prefer) once it became a more vocal niche market in the western world. It’s just, overall, so freakishly overwhelming…as if attempting to watch every single franchise ever made isn’t. Ah, but there’s the overlap, and fortunately, Space Battleship Yamato is a relatively early and simple work of anime to start from. So watch me learn.
Here’s what I presume to know about anime, historically, with minimal reference to Wikipedia or whatever else: it’s Japanese animation. “Japanimation” always struck me as more clever, though harder to say and certainly more racist. The worldwide development of 20th century animation is a slow and steady process, with only a few localized hotbeds (the Disney and Warner Brothers studios, for instance) really doing a whole lot. I mean, have you ever actually seen Soviet cartooning? It ain’t a pretty sight. So by the 60s, I’d wager, Japan took on the animation bug.
Stylistically, anime’s unique though mightily varied style owes a huge lot to manga comics, and to historical forms of Japanese art. What’s more interesting to me, though, is that it’s essentially limited animation. I mean, it’s not fully animated, 24 frames-per-second. From its origins, I’d suspect this was a budgetary issue: if you’re making a “Speed Racer” cartoon or whatever, you do what you can. Curiously, this “limited” style has been preserved, allowing an emphasis on individual images perhaps more so than movement.
“Space Battleship Yamato” is surely limited in motion. But in a time where American audiences would connect that notion with recycled, underwhelming Hanna-Barbera productions, most anime does something far more impressive. It is more cinematic, surely, eschewing the presidium approach of cheap American cartoons, and likewise straying forth into more genres than mainstream U.S. cartoonists. Budgeted animation is good for this, as it affords subject matter a goliath like Disney would never touch.
So today’s anime introduction, “Space Battleship Yamato,” belongs in the sci-fi genre as much as it does anime (which isn’t really a genre, but a medium, despite some particular narrative forms it favors). Here we’re talking, initially, about a one-season science fiction TV series, running from 1974 to 1975. As conceived of by producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki, it would be “Lord of the Flies”…in space. The notion was retooled by Leiji Matsumoto, who instead came up with something that rather nicely predicts Star Wars and “Battlestar Galactica” (both of ‘em).
Now…television shows are not what this blog is about. However, the low-rated one-season “Yamato” gave way to cult-like popularity and, thus, to a movie. Released theatrically in basically no place but Japan, 1977’s Space Battleship Yamato: The Movie consists almost entirely of TV show footage, reassembled to form a movie-length arc. That the show had a long-running storyline certainly helps, and in an era before VCRs, rescreening “Yamato” on the big screen was fans’ only way of reliving the experience. And the movie was damnably popular, making more than the local release of Star Wars. Not too shabby!
Okay, so it’s 26 episodes condensed into 130 minutes, and it’s a science fiction concept! Methinks there’ll be a lot of notions to cram into The Movie. The opening fact of a narrator over still images confirms that. Bear with me. We learn it is now the year 2199, and the end is nearing for Earth. Okay…I’m with ya!...The oceans are gone, life is dead on the surface, and mankind has relocated to cities under the ground…Sure, sure, good…And the Planet Gamilas in the Sanzar System has waged war to – Hold up!...Okay, let’s just say evil aliens are plotting mankind’s destruction, and ignore sci-fi’s usual, awkward, nerdy names.
Most of the Solar System is under Gamilas’ control, and the last vestiges of Earth’s defense force are little match for them. Following a lengthy battle dominated by stylized explosions and those same Japanese sound effects which also indicate an unsheathed sword or a smiling face, Commander Okita orders retreat. This is after a lengthy Japanese consideration of duty, humiliation, and kamikazes. Captain Mamoru Kodai alone continues his reckless assault against the…er, Gamilans, I guess they’re called. So he’s dead.
Here’s something that’s already interesting, in spite of the dated animation and genre silliness. Sci-fi is a great format for parable, and I can see nothing else here but a futuristic variation on the events of World War II, as told from the Japanese perspective. And those wicked, Na’vi-blue humanoid Galimusians? Americans – Boo! Hiss! It’s like the original Godzilla, really, and likewise Space Battleship Yamato transcends its pulpy genre origins.
Let us now join Mamoru’s brother and fighter pilot, Susumu Kodai, along with teammate Shima, as they patrol Galimus-controlled Mars. Here a UFO crashes and, since it’s an anime, disgorges a beautiful, ethereal blonde alien chick. And because it’s an early anime, Kodai phases oddly through the nymph’s crashed ship in one of the strangest animation mistakes I’ve ever seen. The waif perishes, but passes on a capsule to our heroes.
They return to the dried-out husk of Earth, where talk currently concerns the one-year deadline until mankind’s extinction, thanks to the asteroid-based radiation Galimus is constantly pelting our planet with. Such dire, doom-laden setups put me in an introspective mood; it is for this that I appreciate this movie. Here Kodai and Shima open anime chick’s capsule, which comes bearing technobabble plot exposition…and plenty more crazy sci-fi words Spellcheck detests. The dead girl was Sasha. She comes bearing the Wave Motion Engine (WME), a device (both mechanical and plot) that shall help the Earthlings reach Sasha’s sister, not Malia but Stasha, on the Planet Iscandar, twin of Galimus, 148,000 light years from Earth in the Magellenic Cloud System. Upon undertaking this silly trek, Earth shall be rewarded with a device that can clean up the radiation and save the world. Why they could send a WME, and not this, I’m sure the TV series explains in greater detail.
Again ignoring the silly details, this is a great setup – a perilous, long journey to retrieve an artifact, then return it to rescue mankind. Like George Lucas around the same time, it seems the good folk behind Yamato were aware of the monomyth – which has grown ever so tiresome now.
Onto presumably the next episode: In a film’s rare moment devoted to characters rather than tech and spectacle, Kodai and Shima make the rash, youthful decision to go have an abridged action sequence with a Gamilarian (or whatever) fighter. Thus they crash onto Earth’s desiccated surface, stranded before the long-lost remains of the great battleship Yamato.
Okay, history sidetrack time, though it’s not like the movie itself doesn’t do likewise some 10 minutes later. Battleship Yamato was the greatest battleship ever designed, the crown jewel in Japan’s fleet during World War II. This beast of a boat even battled the evil, evil U.S. empire at Midway…about halfway through the war. In 1945, the behemoth left on a one-way suicide mission to Okinawa, Japan’s desperate final gambit; it did not succeed, but was sunk with all hands, the victim of can-do American flyboys.
The narrator informs us, filling in the edited-out gaps from the TV show, that it is indeed this historical Yamato which has been retrofitted into the titular craft: Space Battleship Yamato! With Commander Okita and his perpetual naval cap at the helm (and Kodai and Shima promoted to Combat and Navigation Chiefs in a single sentence of narration), Yamato shall set sail for outer space, the salvation of all humanity lying in the balance.
This is the franchise’s central conceit, and it’s a doozy! For two reasons (at least). One, this literalizes as purely as I’ve ever seen the sci-fi notion that space is the ocean. You know, Star Wars and all those other works treating space combat like some Pacific campaign from WWII? This series plays up the parallel, with a craft that actually fought those battles. (And cruises at something called “space knots,” which is never not hilarious.) Nail on the head, I’d say!
The other reason: This solidifies the WWII metaphor by quelling a nation’s psyche following great defeat. It is a second chance for Yamato, former symbol of Japan’s glory, serving an outer space parallel to its final Okinawa journey, with Earth subbing for Japan (a common tact in anime stories, I’d imagine). Of course, our Japanese heroes shall be victorious this time (spoiler). It’s nationalistic, sure, but no more so than Independence Day – and it gains favor for treating on real tragedy that was three decades old at the time, rather than a victorious conflict the to-be-U.S. fought in the 18th century. (Ugh, ID4!)
So begins Yamato’s symbolic journey across the heavens. What follows is the bulk of the TV series, as the Yamato encounters crisis after crisis as the Galiminans (or whatever) try to stop them. This is where individual episodes become apparent. Assume one crisis per episode, narrator employed to fill us in on what cannot be shown outright.
The first of these crises is the most exciting, because it’s novel, and because it ties in to Earth where the central plot and premise are still at their core. (Most of the crises to follow are rather self-contained, and could be dropped without jeopardizing the overall story.) This concerns the first test of Yamato’s warp drive (which was never actually deployed in WWII) – this is accompanied by a wild mound of techno-expo about the 3rd and 4th dimensions and the alignment of space and time. What it amounts to, on Yamato’s bridge interface at least, is successfully doing something Pong-like. Yamato’s gone from Midway to Midway Arcades. Oh, and warping produces wavy, trippy colors – but you knew that, since it’s 1970s sci-fi, post-2001.
Things then skip over whatever episodes exist concerning Mars. Suddenly Yamato is over the jungles of Jupiter (?!), where Okita deigns to test out their WMD WME for the first time. Take that, random hovering space island. (Okay, the Japanese have a far greater threshold for taking silly notions seriously than I do, and see no problem wedding individually outlandish sci-fi notions to their greater metaphorical narrative.)
Another mostly context-free crisis takes place, this one on Pluto (the good Yamato folks have absolutely no interest in Uranus – Hi-yo!). Kodai, who’s been playing Yamato’s Starbuck up ‘til now (that is, Katee Sackhoff, only not hot), leads a ground assault against the Gamimininian (or whatever) forces. And thus, no more radioactive asteroids shall be launched at Earth – with it goes any A-bomb symbolism.
Sailing further into the void of deep space, Yamato receives its final transmission from Earth. The brink of despair, Yamato mankind’s only hope, yadda yadda, the usual.
“Yamato will return!” Okita triumphantly proclaims through his gloriously bushy beard. This cues a non-diagetic male chorus to sing over-specific praises of the Yamato’s voyage, itself affording a montage of galactic sights that rather nicely glosses over several unwanted episodes.
(It occurs to me that the television show is almost certainly the better format for this tale of heroism and genocide. What I’m getting here is merely a taste – and a mis-paced, mis-edited taste – of an original concept. Still, plenty of the show’s apparent passion and drive filters through. All in all, this is a project I can respect more for its ideas than I can for the actual execution.)
Next crises: The Galmmnnmnmn Emperor Desler hatches his latest Yamato-sinking scheme – he’ll launch a ravenous nanospore of metal-eating gas. Yamato shall be trapped between the cloud and an Alpha star – it’s your old Scylla and Charybdis scenario, because all nautically-themed adventures have “The Odyssey” at their core. As usual, things look hopeless right up until the magical final solution, devised as always by Okita. But he’s falling sick, and thus it is up to Kodai to serve as Acting Commander – in a somewhat under-emphasized character arc, which I’m sure the show does more fully.
Oh, and Kodai’s also got himself a token romance – with Yamato’s resident Uhuru equivalent, Yuki Mori. This doesn’t really become an issue yet.
The next crisis occurs with clockwork: Yamato faces off against the majority of Galimatius’ (or whomever’s) armed forces, and General Domel [sneezes] Rommel. Wait, do Japanese WWII metaphors extend to Germany? No matter, Yamato alone is victorious, though this is the lengthiest of all the film’s space battles – as it displays the highest amount of animated spacecraft destruction. The producers know what fans want (the same basic nonsense Star Wars provided, but in cartoon form, and with a Japanophile bent). The battle centers around a ginormous (space) drill, which reminds me of the drill from Tomorrow Never Dies – Must I always connect things back to Bond?! Domel, in all his military genius, gives the drill an over-generous 15-minute explosive timer, allowing Shima (now the engineer – unless I cannot tell cartoon characters apart) ample opportunity to reprogram the weapon to counter and destroy Domel’s forces. I think I can spot the flaw in Domel’ strategy.
Okita holds a funeral for Yamato’s casualties. It’s like a normal burial at sea – but in space.
One more central crisis before we can reach Iscandar. Emperor Desler lures Yamato to Planet Gamilas, which resembles nothing so much as a whiffle ball, with intent to melt Yamato in the acid seas that make up Gamilas’ volcano-ridden second hollow layer beneath the surface. It’s sci-fi, Japanese-style! They have a particular sense for the ridiculous, don’t they? And luring your enemy into your home planet’s weakest spot? I don’t need Death Star plans to tell you that’s a fool idea. But as per usual, initially everything is turning up Desler, with Yamato twisting in the throes of a manmade (er, alienmade, really) storm. Missiles are launched. It’s another chance for the movie to go overboard with the FX footage, and even reuse cells doing sometimes quadruple duty. These are, for me, the least interesting moments in the film.
Finally, it is Okita (naturally) who proposes firing on Gamilas’ rich veins of volcanic ore. The Yamato so does, and the planet’s surface is beset by a chain reaction of volcanic eruptions – another excuse for the effects animators to re-earn their paychecks. (They have a yen for making yen.) In the face of disaster, Desler, so far your classic cackling villain, actually cackles in defeat. Let no one say the Emperor doesn’t have a sense of humor about his own race’s surprise extinction.
Sci-fi silliness having given way to genocide, the crew of the Yamato are overcome by what they’ve done. “A world has died.” “How can I face God now?” “Victory tastes like ashes.” Here’s where Space Battleship Yamato truly earns its right to explore WWII history in a sci-fi setting: What if the Japanese had bombed the U.S., effectively? It’s not a straight up question (that would be stupid), but it questions what victory is, even when both sides are fighting for their own survival. Somewhere in here there’s a consideration of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction, that is, not the satirical magazine).
Villains defeated, and with, like, a whole half hour still to go, Yamato alights upon the sea planet Iscandar – several months overdue. Uh oh! Here they meet Queen Stasha, though it occurs to me (via the Internet) that her name is actually Starsha. If that’s the case, they ought to have let the subtitle guys know (I did watch it in Japanese, after all)…(Oh, and I think Desler’s name is really spelled…ah hell, the Internet cites like 3 or 4 different names. Who cares?)
No matter, Iscandar is an Edenic paradise, despite its depleted population and rising sea levels – Hey, it’s like the Maldives! Stasha (or Starsha, maybe) mistakes Yuki for her dead sister Sasha…Or was it Stasha (or Starsha, maybe) who died on Mars? Who cares, for all anime girls look the same, which is the precise source of Stasha’s (or Starsha’s, or Sasha’s) confusion here. That, or Space Battleship Yamato has suddenly gone all New Agey…That’s it! Clear-cut conflict gone, this ‘70s sci-fi goes the sub-Zardoz route (brr!) by allowing Iscandar to simply be strange. It must be noted, this is the one moment of the movie made originally for the screen; no TV episodes correspond to this nuttiness.
As it stands, the S-named Iscandanavian has a further surprise for our loyal Yamamites: Kodai’s brother, thought dead since the opening, has instead been recouping here 148,000 light years from where we last saw him, for contrived reasons. Cue the excessive sort of weeping Japanese cartoon characters are known for.
Kodai’s brother, Mamoru, is all set to leave with Yamato, only he’s fallen in love with S(t)a(r)sha too (or whatever her name is). It’s melodrama time! New Age imagery and melodrama…you’re kinda losin’ me on the back stretch here, Space Battleship Yamato. But in the end, Mamoru opts to stay with his unnamable bride. Kodai, putting altogether too fine a point on it, directly compares them to Adam and Eve. (For unexplained reasons, Yuki is now in a sling.)
The Yamato is set to return to Earth and – Hey wait, what about that device to remove Earth’s radiation? You know, the whole reason this trek was undertaken?...Sure, Miss S says, here it is, with the highly nutbar name of Cosmo-Cleaner D. I think I got some of that under my sink. Only…the Cosmo-Cleaner ain’t assembled yet (that’s why it didn’t warrant a C, B or A), so it’s up to the long-absent Shima. This is a rather unnecessary plot wrench, as he’ll have the thing ready anyway once Yamato has made the convenient warp jump all the way back to Earth.
Okita, who’s been on his death bed for the latter half of their hegira, has been holding out with the sole intent to see Earth again. He gets a touching deathbed scene, quite at odds with the dramatically suspicious Iscandar goings-on. Earth comes into view, and Okita dies an old man, clutching a photo of his family. It’s a touching moment, hampered only by the outrageously caricatured Dr. Sado character, who even refers to Okita’s illness as “space radiation sickness.”…Space, the final word modifier!
A montage depicts the crew’s celebration, with a naval song fully recapping the entire story with far greater efficiency than I can muster. The final shot is of Yamato nearing the still-brown Earth, as titles on screen (a common device throughout the flick) inform us that everything then turns out A-OK for humanity…And the Earth fades to blue.
Well, I’m of two minds about Space Battleship Yamato. I love the historical metaphor, and the treatment of Earth’s dying days, but I’m not so sure about the insane space battle stuff. I mean, it’s like there were two influences here: the same pulpy “Flash Gordon” type serials that inspired Star Wars, and the moody and serious literary science fiction which it as complete odds with that mode. To see both methods employed in one work is odd, and not wholly successful in my mind. But I suspect that’s the tonal mode of much anime. Intelligent and serious one minute, then silly and juvenile the next. Maybe that’s why some people like it. I sure as hell don’t know! But there’ll be plenty more time to get a handle on the medium.
Related posts:
• No. 2 Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato (1978)
• No. 3 Space Battleship Yamato: The New Voyage (1979)
• No. 4 Be Forever Yamato (1980)
• No. 5 Final Yamato (1983)
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